


tumblings

by More_night



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Animals AU, Drabble Format, Gen, Scar Worship, Sick Dogs, asphyxiophilia, bedelia is the next metal gear, many tome-wan missing scenes, now with a surprise Bev lives and saves the day AU, post-finale motel room with bed sharing and smut, post-finale sweets, sad drunk hannibal, scars at dinner, season one dreams, slightly gorish
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2018-12-07 03:23:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 18,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11614854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: Tumbling, n.: In gymnastics, a sporting discipline that involves doing sommersaults, handsprings, etc. without the use of apparatus. "A perfect tumbling."Short things posted on tumblr.





	1. rewatch drabbles season one

**Author's Note:**

> Things posted [here on my tumblr](https://davantagedenuit.tumblr.com/tagged/my-fic). There are quite a lot of those now.

**1x01  
**

 

“What did Jack ask you?” Will says, when they stop at a red light.

“My professional opinion on you.” Hannibal’s eyes are attached to a forgotten paper coffee cup. It shakes in the holder as the rental car vibrates. “Wouldn’t you rather ask me, why do I think he wants it?”

“Answering with questions is _passé_ , Doctor.”

“I think he wants to know if he can trust you.”

“For what?”

“We will soon find out.”

Will reaches out for the coffee cup and shifts it in its holder so that it stops rattling. Hannibal turns, smiles. The light goes green.

 

 

 

**1x02**

 

Freddie Lounds takes pride in using dead-on attributive adjectives. Not to cultivate the grotesque, but enough to bring out someone’s own gruesomeness. But now, while Dr Lecter sets her purse on his side of the couch, she freezes and wonders what’s the word for him.

“Is this the part where you expect me to blow you? Or is there a glitzier word?”

Dr Lecter’s eyes are empty, soulless. “No. This is the part where you entertain unedifying ideas of perversion regarding psychiatrists.”

She holds out her hand, hopes she doesn’t look like a skittish, fretful lady. “My bag,” she asks.

 

 

 

**1x03**

 

The lady at the Port Haven clinic front desk thinks he and Dr Lecter have the same adress. It takes Will a moment to process what’s happening. But Hannibal has already corrected: “We’re colleagues.”

“I’m sorry,” she stammers. “Since you guys both applied as guardians, I thought…”

“Please. No harm done,” Hannibal says, warm, why always so warm.

Will knows that warm people are like blankets: eventually, they slide off of you and there’s nothing left but cold air and trembling hearts. He looks at Hannibal and beyond the warmth he sees shadows that look like him and quake fiercely.

 

 

 

**1x04**

 

Will shuts the door, lets Rockie lick his hand and Winston gnaw at the luggage ticket on his bag. Hannibal had taken Will’s keys with an amused glimmer in his eyes: “Offering me the opportunity to peek in your literal drawers, Will?”

Drawers seem fine. No books moved on the shelves.

The trace of Hannibal’s presence, he finds in the kitchen. On the counter, the dogs’ bowls are washed and placed in the most immaculate pile Will has ever seen, beside a dish towel folded in a perfect square.

Will breathes. He is inside the scintillating boat, at last.

 

 

 

**1x05**

 

Mid-session, Will accepts Hannibal’s offer of a glass of water.

“Jack told me his wife had cancer last night,” Will says.

“He confided in you.”

Will stands, sluggish. “I…” Hannibal watches the sodium thiopental work. “I went home… after… And I slept… just fine.”

“Unburdenings can be soothing.”

“I don’t feel-…” Will tries to hold on Hannibal’s desk, then collapses to the ground.

Hannibal kneels and lifts a hand to Will’s face. He closes his eyes when he finally touches the skin, warmer than he would have thought. Hours later, the scent of the encephalitis would linger on his fingers.

 

 

 

**1x06**

 

Will watches Alana leave Chilton’s office and turns to the window. Chilton fidgets with a Montblanc pen. “Word is you’re Hannibal Lecter’s patient.”

“Whose word?”

“People talk.”

Tapping his knuckles against the glass, Will doesn’t look back. “That’s what Dr Lecter and I do. We just talk.”

“Of course,” Chilton scoffs. “He wouldn’t want to frighten you away with the P-word.”

Taking his eyes from the white sky outside, Will clenches a fist then turns slowly around. “Think I could frighten you, Dr Chilton?” In Chilton’s face, snideness starts wobbling. Will feels slightly freer and adjusts his glasses. “I’ll wait outside.”

–

Opening her eyes to sunlight, Miriam Lass feels the flush in her chest first, the sprained muscles in her shoulders. The way her throat clenches reminds her that she was just trying to scream, before everything went black.

She scrambles in the bed, kicks the soft sheets.

Lecter is sitting in the armchair by the window. “Are you hungry?” he asks her. “Or still nauseous?”

There’s a dark, aching needle puncture on her wrist.  “You didn’t kill me.”

“No.”

Her heart beats frantically, like it’s roaring. “Why-… why didn’t you?”

“You found me. I see no reason to kill you.”

 

 

 

**1x07**

 

In the car ride back to Quantico, Will focuses on the stains of Silvestri’s victim’s blood, drying on Dr Lecter’s wrist. It brings him right back to the hospital room, to Abigail. _Dad?_

“Jack Crawford told me you see the Ripper as a deformed infant, hiding his pathetic monstrosity from the world,” Hannibal’s voice rouses him.

Will sighs. “I don’t think I said ‘deformed infant’.”

“Jack may have rephrased, then.”

“Does it sound…?”

“Like a classical view? A bit.” Hannibal inspects the powder left on his thumb by the nitrile glove. “Also sounds like something Jack Crawford would say.”

 

 

 

**1x08**

 

Caramelized bread melts, mangosteen unfolds, cardamom lingers. He wonders if Will tastes it.

“I’d already screwed up one of your mornings. I guess dinner was the next step…” Will says, eyes on his dirtied hands.

“He wasn’t the most agreable guest. Too conventional for my taste.”

A pause. Will licks chocolate syrup from his fork. “I was expecting something linking my absent mother to my amorous endeavors.”

“As a matter of fact, I hope you came because you expected nothing like that.”

“So what am I expecting from you?”

“For now?” Hannibal relishes, but moderates his own drives. “More wine.”

 

 

 

**1x09**

 

After the salad, Hannibal brings the next course: three round-bellied shooter glasses, a gleaming ounce of amber in each. “Calvados,” Hannibal presents. “Infused with vanilla. As a _trou normand_.”

Abigail frowns. “It dilates the stomach and increases appetite,” Will explains. “Makes room for more.”

“It has been distilled from the same cider you’re drinking, Abigail,” Hannibal tells her. “ _Cul sec_ ,” he says.

The three of them drink. Freddie Lounds throws her head back. Will’s eyes are on her throat, bared, _pale, broken, open_.

“That’s French for… bottoms up, right?” Abigail says.

Hannibal nods approvingly.

“Literally means dry ass,” Freddie remarks.

 

 

 

**1x10**

 

The clinic nurse hands him a personal information form to fill out. Will eyes the first line, where he should write his full name. “I don’t want to sound morbid,” he says.

Hannibal steps away from the impressionist replica he was examining on the wall of the waiting room. He huffs. “Will.”

“If it’s serious. Untreatable serious. Of whatever kind. Physical or-…” The pen stills in Will’s hand.

“Will.”

“I know you’re not exactly a dog person.” Will lifts his head. “But could you make sure they’re fine if I…? I mean, in general.”

Hannibal’s mouth twitches, and he nods.

 

 

 

**1x11**

 

Behind glass, Hannibal watches Dr. Chilton’s unconscious form in the recovery room. Dr. Gideon’s work was neat in revenge if not soulful in beauty. For a moment, Hannibal considers incapacitating the nurse. The Chesapeake Ripper could severe a patch of skin from Frederick’s belly as lard. Something easily unnoticed.

Instead, he stares on. Alana is with Will in his room, worried. He cannot bring himself to join her at his bedside, nor to leave the hospital. In his chest, something curls, weaves and soars that is not worry, but much more.

And so he stays and thinks of braised cheeks.

 

 

 

**1x12 + 1x13**

 

After a time, they have to run. Mischa starts left, then she goes around the barn and, there, he loses sight of her. He thinks of going back, but she has made him promise. He waits for her in the squalid shed, near the outside entrance to the cellar. After too long a time, she walks in with a smile of triumph.

He takes her to his chest in her parents’ kitchen. “I was worried about you.” When he releases Abigail from the hug, there is blood on his coat from the large wound in her side. She still smiles.

–

On this kitchen floor, her blood seems more hers, somehow. When there is only an inch left in the glass canister, Hannibal’s hand stops the press of her finger on the pump’s trigger. She eyes it. “What’s that for?”

“It’s for Will,” Hannibal says. A lump has formed in her throat, and he doesn’t seem to feel differently, but still, he stores the leftover blood and leads her to the bathroom.

The needle pricks the cartilage of her ear, then six other places around it. He asks her to keep her head straight. She stares at the familiar, off-white ceiling.

–

He sits at the piano. It has been a moment since he hasn’t touched the keys.

The phone rings. “I heard,” Alana says. “About Will.” He swallows silently. “I should…” She has been crying. “I should take his dogs.”

“He asked me to do it,” Hannibal says. “You don’t have to feel obligated.”

“I want to do it. I should do this, at least,” she says. Then, “I like them.” Then, “I like him.”

“I know,” Hannibal says.

The breath she takes is flaring and deep. “You’re crying, Hannibal.”

Another tear reaches his jawline. “I am. And so are you.”

–

Jack takes his gun down while Hannibal kneels by Will’s side. His fingers find Wil’s pulse, shivering like the one of a beaten animal.

“Get up,” Jack says. “Clean yourself up.”

It’s only in the bathroom of the Hobbs’ house that Hannibal sees the scattered pin points of red on his left cheek. He had smelled it, but the galaxy-like spread, he had no idea of. Raising his right thumb to his face, he collects Will’s blood from his skin, one stroke after the other, and licks it clean. It tastes of heady copper and his own sweat of today.

 

 


	2. rewatch drabbles season two

**2x01**

 

Winston has searched the house, but everything he knew is gone. Jack glances down at the dog’s head in his lap. It’s heavy and trusting. “Do you know Claude Bernard?”

“Major 19th century physiologist. Supporter of vivisection,” Alana says. “His wife came home to find he had cut the family dog open.”

Jack nods. “Put fistulas between organs and skin to see what went on inside.”

“Knowledge is sometimes tempting enough to ignore pain.” She quirks an eyebrow. “At least others’ pain.”

Jack’s face darkens. “Is that what I did?”

Winston jumps down the bed to continue searching, again, forever.

 

 

 

**2x02**

 

He has since long stopped looking at the color of Will’s eyes to better see the masks, winds and visions adjusting behind them.

On his way to the cornfield, everything reminds him of their shade: the golden kernels, the rusty ground, the verdant leaves.

And finally, the killer’s iris of bodies stares back at him with a graying tone in the darkness of the silo. Will is there, whole.

“What do you think your eye is looking at?” he asks. The bound, drugged killer doesn’t answer, his pupil widening madly. “Or do you fear no one is looking at you?”

 

 

 

**2x03**

 

In front of her bathroom mirror, Alana repeats. “I have a professional curiosity about him.” Is that looking like she’s not lying? “I wish Will was different,” she tries. There. Her cheeks have stiffened, her upper lip has curled. She knows the signs herself. She goes for the truest and watches. “I should never have told anyone about Will Graham. I should have warned all of them to stay away.” In her mind, Will’s lawyer chuckles. “You should have kept him locked away, fearing for what might happen?” He imitates a buzzer sound. “Next.”

Will keeps his eyes off her.

 

 

 

**2x04**

 

They come and get Jack at the hospital. Two agents rouse him and when he lifts his head, he doesn’t know if they step back because they’re reddened or because of the hot chagrin living there. He has them repeat what they’ve just said. Because it’s impossible: Dr. Lecter was right there in the hospital room with him, not two hours ago.

“Dr. Hannibal Lecter has been found dead with one of your people on the scene, Agent Beverly Katz.”

It seems insane to leave Bella now. But two guys from the OIG are there too and he cannot possibly stay.

Jimmy and Brian are already at Hannibal Lecter’s house when he arrives. They’re silent and placid, with their gloves on, but there’s so many people they can’t touch anything. Beverly is a bit farther in. She sits on the ground in the kitchen, which looks like the backstage of everything Jack’s always seen on the dining-room side, clean and organized. Except for the gurney along the wall with the body bag on it. Its edges were closed, but not zipped, so Jack can glimpse a tear of plaid wool with blood on it.

He turns at Beverly. A paramedic is with her and dabs at her temple. An impressive cut runs from the corner of her eye to her neck. “The Muralist was missing a kidney,” she explains. She points at meat sealed in plastic, going into numbered evidence bags. “Probably one of those,” Beverly says. Not meat, Jack understands, not exactly. But really, he begins to wonder, is there a name for that?

“Will told you he’d be missing a kidney?”

“He told me he’d be missing _something_. That it’d be hidden. That…” – her eyes go to the body bag - “That he wouldn’t be able to resist it.”

“And you knew he’d be at the hospital…” Jack says.

She nods her head back against the wall. “Zeller and Price told me.” The medic starts stitching the cut where the blade went deeper, near her throat. “He’s good with knives.”

Jack realizes his mouth is faintly gaping. The medics come into the room with another gurney, oxygen and blankets. “Who else did you bring here?” he asks.

The stitches are done and Beverly stands up carefully, places a hand on his arm until he looks at her and closes his mouth. “You might want to sit down, Jack. I…” She sighs. “She was hooked on so many things, I didn’t want to take her off any of them. It took me a while to recognize her.”

Leaving Beverly’s side, Jack makes his way to the open door to what seems to be a pantry. In the ground, a large trapdoor is open. Two agents climb the narrow and steep stairs. They are holding a young woman up. She wears white pajamas, socks and slippers. Her right arm is missing, with the cut still a faint pink at the elbow. Her hair is slightly shorter than it used to be, combed, and her eyes are empty. She passes Jack without a flicker of awareness.

Jack remembers that he had thought that, at Bella’s side, that’s the closest to death he could be. But he inhales and exhales and only rot and blood come out.

 

 

By the end of the day, they’re allowed downstairs. Zeller gets there first. Everyone else, their mother, their mother’s piano teacher and their odd goth cousin has been here, so it looks like a public place now, well-lit with glaring spots. But most likely, all of them had been dutifully wearing the same yellow suits Zeller, Price and Katz have on, because the basement is still impeccably clean. It also contains everything anyone could possibly dream of to dismember, hang, tie down, pull apart and liquify.

“Is that a bone saw?” Price says, pointing to what has some looks in common with a guillotine.

Beverly nods. “He has a portable one upstairs too.”

Zeller leans down to inspect underneath. Not a drop of blood, not even a smudge. The steel’s polish is intact and it shines. “So this is for what? Grain-fed buffalos?”

“Whole bodies, I’m guessing,” Beverly says.

At the end of the room, there’s an industrial freezer that uses nitrogen. It can freeze a pound a minute.

The boys turn on the black lights and whistle when the room comes back clean. They do find hair, but one of them is Lass’s and the other one is Beverly’s.

“Agent Katz,” a tall man calls out from the end of the room.

They ask her to reconstitute the events as well as she can. She takes a deep breath and tells them how she found the trapdoor in the ground, the hidden handle under the counter. She will have to tell them that she listened to Will Graham, but that’ll go in her complete report. This is just to map out the crime scene.

“I discovered the witness, missing FBI trainee Miriam Lass, and lowered my gun to search for a light switch. When I managed to turn the lights on, I saw Hannibal Lecter. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs.” She points the back of the room. “Right there.”

“You hadn’t heard him prior to that?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know how he did it. I was careful to leave no trace of suspicious entry. Up to the wine spill.”

Will Graham’s voice comes, quiet and detached, as he gets down the stairs. “Most likely, he smelled you.”

He’s still wearing the prison uniform, but with his coat over it. Beverly smiles. He tries for a smile back, but it doesn’t quite work and he lowers his head, eyes darting around him, as if he can’t really believe what surrounds him.

 

 

The next morning, Bella wakes up. Jack has returned to her room. He hasn’t changed his clothes and his face is grave, but the traces of the tears are gone. She extends her hand to him and frowns, because she doesn’t really trust her voice and the oxygen mask is fogged over with her breath. “I was wrong,” Jack says. “About Will Graham.”

He tells her everything and she listens. At the end, he repeats, “Hannibal Lecter was the Chesapeake Ripper.” He shakes his head and his mouth does something like a snarl. “Not only right under my nose, but… enjoying every minute of my company.”

Bella slips the mask off. “He saved me,” she says.

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Yeah, he did.” He looks down at his hands. They’re holding his badge. “And I don’t have the slightest idea why.”

 

 

Then it’s like a dam breaking.

At the Chandel Square house, they find human remains from seventeen different individuals, all well-preserved, some cured, some canned, some marinated, some frozen. Sweeping Lecter’s office, they find 13 scalpels and knives, hidden in books, chairs, drawers, carpets, plants, curtains. Will doesn’t smile or say I told you so. All the revelations seem to pile around him like walls of his own making.

They find Abigail Hobbs in Hannibal Lecter’s Chesapeake Bay house. Save for her excised ear, she’s well. When the SWAT team breaks in, she’s in the kitchen, skinning a rabbit she caught in a snare nearby. She was going to stuff it with candied plums, maroons and its own cooked offal. Will wants to talk with her and after a few days, he’s allowed into her room.

He requests to go in alone and no one knows what they say to each other, or if they say anything.

The rest, Will doesn’t learn, but glimpses when he goes through the files. There are fake passports, one for Hannibal, one for Abigail and one for him. There are sketches of the view outside his Wolf Trap house. There are lures Hannibal fabricated, not made with human remains. Those Will snatches right out of the file, slips in his pocket and keeps.

One day, he has walked his dogs miles from the house, into town and stops at a 24/7 to get them some water. He sees copies of the latest Tattlecrime in a pile with the other tabloids. The front page is a picture of him and Hannibal Lecter, at a crime scene, if he judges from their blue gloves and the badge he wears around his neck. They’re surrounded by trees and autumn leaves. Will is looking at something outside the frame, head downcast, and grins largely. Hannibal is looking at Will and smiles too. The title says something about the killer mocking the FBI’s renowned profiler.

Will feels bile rising, because that smile wasn’t mockery.

He returns home in the afternoon, sits on his bed and grabs a pillow. He puts it over his face and finally releases the scream he’d been holding.

 

 

“Hello Mrs. Crawford,” Will says.

“Hello Will Graham,” she says. From time to time, she still needs the oxygen mask, but progressively, after the shock of near-death, her body returns to its state of generalized if invisible decay, and its accompanying army, weakness.

The man in front of her has longer hair than the one Jack showed her on the back of a forensics book he has at home. He wears thick glasses and leans forward in his seat, somewhat uncomfortable, but mindful of why he’s here. “Jack thinks I can understand this,” he says.

“Can you?”

“Did he tell you I could?”

She closes her eyes slowly. “No,” she says. “I think Jack feels guilty.”

Will nods and archs his eyebrows emphatically. “There’s some of that,” he concedes. “You went to Dr. Lecter’s office to die?”

She nods.

“And he saved you.”

Another nod.

“That bothers Jack.”

“It bothers me too,” she says. “Only not for the same reasons.”

Will gets up from his seat. “I can’t help you, Mrs. Crawford.”

She struggles to get her hand off the bed and holds it out. “Jack thought you’d know because he’d… done the same for you. Taken you to trial, then…”

“Killed the judge, getting me off trial,” Will goes on. “He’s convinced everyone, including me, that I’d killed Abigail Hobbs. And Abigail Hobbs is now unkilled and well. He’s put me in prison, then he got me a passport to get out of the country,” he lists. “He got us all passports,” he corrects.

“And you don’t have a clue?”

Will sighs and pulls his glasses higher on his nose. “I think Jack wants me to tell you that by saving you he’d exert control over your life. That taking lives or saving lives,” he says. “Are similar in nature.” He pauses. “I suspect Jack also thinks he’s done it to piss you off, to prolong suffering for both of you.”

“That’d be really twisted cruelty. Very soft, in its own way,” Bella says while a streak of sunlight illuminates the white hospital gown she wears. “It doesn’t seem to fit.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Will gives a weak smile and starts for the door. Once he reaches the doorway, he stops. “Do you feel alone?”

Bella doesn’t nod or move, but her eyes slowly fill with tears. “Is that what you think he wanted?” 

“Maybe,” Will says. “I feel alone too.”

 

 

Alana wakes up alone. She slips out of bed and feels for the shirt on the armchair near the bed. Stepping over Buster, coiled in his green pad, she goes to the porch outside. They’re well into spring now, but she the cool air raises goosebumps on her naked legs and she crosses her arms over the flannel shirt.

Will is there, staring into the night, with Winston’s head on his thigh. “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he says.

“I woke myself.”

She sits beside him and warms slowly as she holds her knees tight together. Their bodies touch, but Will’s attention is not there. A warm wind blows from the fields, carrying smells of drying mud and sodden wood.

“Please don’t tell me I need to accept that I won’t understand it,” Will says quietly.

Alana remembers the last time she told him that he should accept what he had done, in the visitors’ room at the BSHCI. Overtime, she has started using that word less and less. It seems loaded now. “I don’t intend to,” she says. “You shouldn’t. There’s nothing to accept. We keep fighting and eventually we lose the obstinacy and patience.”

Will’s palm close over her left knee and he tilts his head on her shoulder. “I feel like I’ve given him his greatest victory. That this has left me lapsed and bare.”

She slides her fingers over his. “Don’t give in. None of this was a game,” she says. “It was death and you survived, Will.”

They remain silent and Will feels the peace growing from the ground, as warmth, moving to the steps to the porch, then into his legs. But it’s like sea water: the waves lap at his legs, they wet him but never fill him up. “Do you remember when I kissed you the first time?”

Alana smiles, huffs and nods. Some of her hair fall off from her bun and between them.

“I went to his house, after.”

She stiffens slightly. “You went to Hannibal Lecter’s house?”

“I… thought if I spoke about it, it meant I hadn’t hallucinated it,” he says. “And I trusted him.” They part so that Alana can look at Will. “I asked him if he was jealous. He poured me a glass of wine and asked me ‘Of which one of you?’ At the moment, it seemed like a joke.”

Brushing Will’s hair back behind his ear, Alana looks into his eyes. They’re a different blue than her own and she wonders if hers seem this haunted. After a moment, Will breaks the gaze to kiss the side of her hand.

“I’ll put on some pants. We should go for a walk, the sun’s just about to rise,” she says

 

 

 

**2x05**

 

Alana finds him in the hospital’s morgue. Night turns into morning. She has cried. The painkillers have wrapped his senses in flurry cotton. His forearms are bandaged to protect the stitches. “I didn’t mean to worry you,” Hannibal says.

“For the past hours, I’ve been in a state of acute distress. So, more or less…” she says. She gestures to the body bag that contains Matthew Brown’s body. It’s on the gurney next to where he sits. “Making sure he’s dead?”

Hannibal nods slowly. Brown is dead. He has considered the heart, but the temperature is wrong. All is spoiled.

 

 

 

**2x06**

 

“You know, traditionally, the devil isn’t an unstoppable force,” Gideon says to the dark. “He desires, he hankers, he clings.”

Graham’s voice goes to the ceiling, fogless. “Satan’s will appeared in 16th century’s iconography, actually.”

Outside, the guards walk slowly. Gideon wonders how fast his heart would beat before Hannibal Lecter took it out. “You never wonder if your devil wants?”

“He’s not my devil,” Graham says.

“Well, he’s not mine.” Gideon muses. Would Graham be the one to take his heart? Or would he just watch. “Or it could be the other way around…”

Graham’s breaths are slow too.

 

 

 

**2x07**

 

Will hears his own voice. I’m going to stay as far away from Hannibal Lecter as I can. He sees himself through Alana’s eyes, as she lets him go, for the first real time. He detaches like a boat leaving its mooring. There’s no sun and he proceeds into the black beyond. Now he’s looking at Miriam. “How would you do it?” he asks. Her lip begins to tremble. “Kill him.”

“I’d…” She twitches. The shattered pieces spasm out of focus again. “I’d do to him what he’s done to me.”

“He hasn’t killed you.”

Her face stills. “Hasn’t he?”

 

 

 

**2x08**

 

Hannibal drives him back to Wolf Trap. They stop in his driveway, near the dark house. Earlier, Will’s mind clung to Peter Bernadone and the bullet. Now, Hannibal is everywhere, face bloodied where the projectile would’ve entered. He wouldn’t have begged.

“Are your lost?” Hannibal asks. “In the dark?”

Will turns to Hannibal. The car is cooling down. “I wish things were simpler.”

“Things?”

The feelings and motions come before his mind follows. They leave a trail of images like blinking shadows.

Hannibal looks at him like he has begun to do. Like he was prey and Will was hunting.

 

 

His coat is cashmere, his scarf is wool and delicate. Will gets so close he sees the hair near the mouth. Nothing touching but their lips, he kisses Hannibal.

They press together tightly. Hannibal’s hand is on his arm, not pushing away, not drawing him close.

Will stops. The car has started to quake. A dense humming swells. The hand slides up his neck and brushes hair back onto his forehead. Tears come to his eyes.

“This would be simpler to you?” Hannibal asks him, his breath on Will’s eyelids.

“It’s not. It wouldn’t be.” Will pulls away, sits back.

 

 

“It’d be clearer to just hate,” Will says.

Hannibal sits straight in the driver seat. He has brought his hands to the wheel. “I don’t hate you, Will.”

Later, Will remembers leaving the car. He has come into his house and shed his clothing. His coat seems a burden and he’s still burning inside. Ingram’s blood is mixed with the horse’s on his shirt, where Peter fingers clang.

He sinks to the floor. Winston eyes him from the kitchen. It takes a moment to Will to realize that he has known for a while that Hannibal doesn’t hate him.

 

 

 

**2x09**

 

Mr. Graham’s hand is wounded: brown blood, charred flesh on his knuckles. “Coyotes are rare in the winter,” George says.

Graham stiffens. Buster does too. “I’m okay,” he says.

“Did it bite you?”

Graham’s fingers go deep in his dog’s fur. The dog calms down, slowly. “I don’t actually know what it was. I just hit it until it let Buster go.”

The veterinarian fills a needle for the rabies shot. “You should get it looked at.”

“I have… a friend,” he says. “He’s a doctor.” He scratches Buster’s head as the needle goes in. “I’ll see him about this.”

 

 

 

**2x10**

 

Will Graham’s bathroom has white tiles. Margot turns the shower on. Rain of purity, rain of death. Water trickles, salvages, cleans.

She lets the noise fill the room for Will to hear. In the cupboard, she finds a white towel. She folds it into a roll. Lying down on the floor, she puts her legs up against the wall and squeezes the towel under her hips.

It’s plain in her imagination. One innocent living thing meets another innocent living thing. They mingle without meaning harm. She tilts her head back against the tiles and waits. She might feel it happening.

 

 

 

**2x11**

 

The sanguine room seems like insides and flesh. Mason has chosen well: the Mercy Hospital must owe him. Margot wakes after some time. She has said she wished never to be awake again. She had a particular voice then. It reminded him of Will, remote as if it hurt, the coldness masking fury, the silence eating the heat underneath.

“You know this” she says.

Hannibal leans closer. “Suffering and abuse? I know a share.”

Empty, her eyes search for something on the ceiling. “You know loss.”

His gaze joins hers above. “Why?”

“Either you like it. Or you really don’t.”

 

 

 

**2x12**

 

Will sees them in the firelight: darker than the arm’s leather, tiny and grouped. He moves his wine glass to his left hand and tests the wounds with his index. The largest incision in the chair’s arm runs deep: Will can slip his fingertip inside. It reaches the wood beneath. It feels like bone.

“Mason,” Hannibal offers.

Soothing, Will smooths the leather with his thumb. He feels like his own skin has been broken. He also longs to stretch the cut until he can rip the chair apart. “Is he dead?”

Hannibal sips his wine. “I am not usually impulsive.”

 

 

 

**2x13**

 

Bedelia buys fish in Paris for their first meal, shortly after they land. Opening it, Hannibal’s knife finds metal. Lodged between the gill and its cover, a tiny hook is set deeply into flesh. It has been there so long a coating of new tissue protects it. Part of its line is twisted into the scar.

“It’s not always enough to cut the line,” Bedelia says.

Hannibal removes all of it and sets it on the cutting board. The barb is rusty. The fish’s blood has eroded it over time. “The hook didn’t kill it.”

“Nor has it killed you.”

 

 

After dinner, Hannibal retreats to his room. It hasn’t stopped raining since they came. He tilts his head to the side and exposes his neck. His fingers search under the flesh for a scar, a buried remnant of line. Will approaches from behind him. He seems new, bloodless, fearless.

“If the hook is barbed, you can’t catch and release,” he says.

“Some still do,” Hannibal says. “Moved by a spark of regret or a fleeting discontentment.”

Will nods. “It is cruel. But really, it depends on how deep the hook goes,” he says. “Swallowing even a pinched barb can kill.”

 

 

The stream is Abigail’s blood. It rises around Will, like it’s hungry. The stagman swims. Its legs are one with the river, dark and reddened. It comes up and stands while Will can’t move.

It slides closer slowly and seems to ponder, before its lips attach to Will’s. There is a short struggle. Will has felt something enter his mouth, shoved in. When the stagman lets go, Will’s bleeding from the fishing hook that was pushed into the inside of his cheek.

When he wakes up, two nurses hold him down. He isn’t conscious, even if he seems to be.

 

 


	3. rewatch drabbles season three

**3x01**

 

In the Florentine morning, he hangs Dimmond from the neck and bleeds him by the thigh. There are oddments of gold on the dead man’s skin with darker spots on his torso. One of them looks like a scar, above the navel.

Will’s voice is never from the past. _He’s beside Hannibal, hands covered with Tier’s lukewarm insides. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says._

Hannibal remembers he offered his help. Now, instead, he puts Dimmond’s ankle on his shoulder and slices from hip to groin until he can dislocate the joint. “You’ll find out. You should do it alone.”

 

 

 

**3x02**

 

Will has a hotel room in Palermo. The walls are white and angels twist in the moldings. Everything is old and sometimes their wings miss a part.

He closes the door and can finally take his glasses off. That’s when he sees him. “How did you get in?” he says.

Hannibal sits in a Voltaire armchair, near a round table where a vase holds potpourri flowers. He wears a three-piece suit in a dark color that Will finds strange. He smiles the way Will hasn’t seen in years. “Your mind is a glass house in which all windows are broken, Will.”

Knees weak, Will sits on the bed. “Foolish of me to think I could keep you out.”

Will places the _Il Mostro_ file down on the bed beside him. He has turned his back to Hannibal. “What do you think of him, the monster?” Hannibal says.

Inside Will’s chest, the heart has stopped beating. It’s struggling and twisting. Something in it wants to come out. “The same I think of you.”

“And what would that be?”

His heart loses the fight and unwinds itself into crumpled parchment that falls into his stomach. “In spite of barriers, I thought we had an understanding. That, at some point where narcissism meets inaccessible madness, you esteemed me worthy of you.”

Hannibal reaches for a dry flower and snaps the bud off the stem. “A preferred enemy. A somewhat serviceable mirror.”

His voice doesn’t have a tinge of sarcasm. Yet it feels like Will’s every thought has turned to liquid mockery. Will breathes in the dust from his peeled heart. “There’s nothing else than pain between us,” he says. “I could only think I liked you when I thought I wasn’t the same as you.”

He doesn’t see Hannibal’s face because he doesn’t turn around. He imagines both a faint, severe tightening of lips and a flash of sadness in blinking eyes. They superimpose and the flaky bud falls, leaving a trace of dark, perfumed powder on the table’s wood.

Hannibal is gone. Will takes his glasses from the bedside table and opens the _Il Mostro_ file in his lap. After a while, he takes his hand to his chest and feels for the heartbeat in the center. It thuds deceivingly, like it isn’t mad. “Turns out being insane isn’t the worst, after all,” someone says. The voice resembles Abigail’s. Will doesn’t look up.

 

 

 

**3x03**

 

Will rinces the green shards from a second bottle in a bucket of water. Hannibal’s voice comes from near. “Is it what you imagined I would do?” he says. “Or is it your own work?”

The glass is rough and Will cuts himself. The water turns pink. “It’s as close as I can get to your memory,” he says.

“To know me better than I know myself?”

Beside Will’s, Hannibal’s hand slides in the water. Their skins brush. On the floor, behind them, the severed head quietly empties of its blood.

“So I know my way out of the rooms.”

 

 

 

**3x04**

 

Margot walks her out. “I’d like to come back here in the spring,” Alana says.

“Once the slaughter season has gone by?”

Alana leans on her cane in a way that takes her closer to the other woman, like a wavering orbit. “There’s a lot about slaughter that isn’t slaughter,” she says.

Thinking of smells of lilac merging with blood, Margot points to the gate. “This is the right way in.”

“I like your stables better,” Alana says.

Margot’s eyes darken. “They’re not mine.”

The rush of darkness in Alana’s chest feels like a glowing river. “No, they are yours.”

 

 

 

**3x05**

 

Chiyoh has changed in the common bathroom in the corridor. She comes back on her naked feet, pale stealth in the dark. Will has taken the top bunk.

She folds her clothing. “Were you and him-…” Will starts.

She stops. “Me and him what?”

Will closes his eyes. “It’s not a good question.”

The pause ends and she folds her crisp, white shirt. Will sees only her image in the window, because there is light inside and night outside. “You’re not asking the good person,” she says.

“There’s no one else,” Will says.

Chiyoh turns the lamp off. “There’s you.”

 

 

 

**3x06**

 

There’s a contraption in one glass case – all Will sees is leather and spikes. They don’t assemble properly. All there is is Hannibal. Will could leave, but his heart is in Hannibal’s chest. “Wounded,” he says. “How wounded?”

“Cuts and laceration. Superficial. A pulled shoulder,” Jack lists. “One knee must be pretty bad.”

Will looks around. The cases are intact, but the whole Palazzo is thick with fights past and present. “How bad?”

Jack’s lips curl somewhat. He radiates victory and Will feels all its tingling ambition and burning wishes. “Stuck a metal hook in it. He had to twist his leg out of it. It cracked.”

The words register, dipping in his skin like blades. The pain in Will’s leg focuses on the knee. The bruises on his face begin to throb light. Will thinks there is no cutting Hannibal out.

He’s already out. He wants him back in.

 

 

The light from the window is sharp like crystal. His tongue is sand in his mouth. Hannibal sees him swallowing. “Water?” he says. Will nods. It feels like a boat bobbing on the rocking ocean.

Hannibal tightens the restrains on Will’s chest, then tilts his jaw while he drinks. It leaves a wet smudge on Will’s cheek where Hannibal’s palm is. When Hannibal cleans it, the cloth is red. “Show me,” Will manages to say.

In Hannibal’s face, the eyes go inside, digging and scavenging. Hannibal isn’t there either. Will thinks they both might be outside of themselves. Somewhere far away, _where Abigail hunts for birds on an unkempt land. “Deer,” she corrects, smiling and white. “My dad only hunted deer. They’re fast. He liked that.” Then, as the night comes, she returns to her grave on the Lecter estate._ At last, Hannibal turns his palm upwards for Will to see.

The gash is deep.

“What do we do now?” Will mumbles.

“We wait,” Hannibal says. He straightens the white tablecloth, sets the cutlery, then kneels smoothly to dip under the table. For a moment, Will senses nothing and time and space become mud. Then, Hannibal moves, hidden from sight. He grasps Will’s leg and leans against it. Will blinks hopelessly, as if he could breathe from his eyes.

Under the table, Hannibal sits with the blade in his right hand. He rests the side of his face against Will’s leg, breathes and waits for the elevator’s bell to ring.

 

 

 

**3x07**

 

The scalpel falls to the ground. Cordell hisses and twists.

Will’s skin feels like it has melted in the gurney. Someone steps into the light over him. “Abigail?” he says.

She smiles. _Her face is the same ashen color as in Florence. “Did you find out?” she asks._

_“I found him,” Will says._

_“No.” She has started crying. “Your own kind of crazy. Did you find it?”_

_Will thinks of Cordell’s cheek on his tongue. He trembles inside, but it feels like he is alive again. “I didn’t know this is how it would feel…” He cries too._

Abigail understands.

 

 

 

**3x08**

 

The Tooth Fairy’s brutality is common, Jack thinks. It is not a dream, but only the darkest, most formless desires running in each of us. It is why people are afraid. It could be him, could be anyone.

The file is on his desk. His office feels small. His heartbeat is suddenly louder.

He opens the file and leafs through the pages. He finds it after the discharge letter.

It says: married Molly Foster on June 19, 2015; lives in Orange county, Vermont; Potter’s son lives with them; works as a carpenter.

And then Will could be just anyone.

  


“It’s harmless,” Jack says.

“Some don’t need to act to harm. To exist is enough,” Alana says. “You want to remind Will of Hannibal’s existence, Jack?”

“Jack’s mind appears set. Firmly so,” Hannibal points out. “As if he wanted the same thing I did.”

All goes silent. “Will can help,” Jack says at last.

Alana closes her eyes and lets it flow over her. Something like the end of some world.

 

 

 

**3x09**

 

Will stared at the phone’s screen. Molly hung up, and he was left in his hotel room. The beige coverlet, the wooden walls, the brown furniture, and the dog, white with hazelnut spots.

_“She’ll be fine,” Abigail’s voice said._ Will waited, hoped he had dreamed it. _“She will,” Abigail said._

_Will swallowed, knew his mind had returned just where it had always been needed. “She_ is _fine,” he said. “I’m just trying not to… undo it.”_

_On the nearby couch, Abigail had her legs bunched under herself. She looked fondly at the dog. “She’ll like him.”_

_“She likes them all.”_

 

 

 

**3x10**

 

Just as they reach the bedroom, Reba says, “Do you still want to know what I think?”

“Yes,” Francis says. His hands cup her face and the heavy claws inside want to crush it to blood. Yet he holds it, because her eyes that cannot see don’t leave him. “I want all your thoughts.”

“At first, I thought you wanted to tell me you were the tiger.” She speaks in between kisses. “But now, I think that I could be too.”

At the farthest point of pleasure, Francis’ fingers dig into skin that has become fur that bleeds with gold.

 

 

At one moment, Neil is in Dr. Lecter’s office. Then the next second feels like the wavering sway before a fall. After that, he is on his back on the carpet. He panics because blood fills his mouth. Dr. Lecter leans over him, his hair a little undone, and he waits.

And he waits.

Neil spits the blood. “You had a seizure,” Dr. Lecter says. “You almost swallowed your tongue.”

Blood runs down Neil’s chin. He staggers when he rises. “I want to go.”

The psychiatrist smoothes his hair. “I don’t recommend it.”

Neil is yelling. The blood comes out of his mouth. The words are jumbled. His tongue feels swollen and liquid all at once. “You’re insane! You’d have let me die…”

Dr. Lecter is stepping closer. “I did think you would die,” he says. “The imminence of death is a striking thing to watch. Movement itself, untwisting the threads of existence.” Neil steps back, fumbles, and finds the door. “I saved your life. Slackened your jaw by applying the heat of my palms to it, so your tongue could slip free.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The psychiatrist cocks his head. He smiles unhappily. “I know. You never have.”

 

 

Reba leaves. Reba takes the sun with her. The air. The quiet of his heart.

Are you weak, the growling voice asks, are you too fragile and too small. What you would do with her. With her eyes that only you see and that don’t see you.

Francis doesn’t talk. He can’t. He can’t. With his insides he says, I think I’ll do something to you.

Will you, it asks.

I’ll find you, Francis speaks. Not with my eyes, but with my teeth. I will lay my eyes, my nose, my skin, my ears on you. Then I’ll have you.

 

 

 

**3x11**

 

“You’re Walter, right?” Jack says.

The boy looks tired, wide-eyed and withdrawn, the way shock looks in children. He just says, “I remember you.”

Jack’s smile tightens. He sits down. “Your mom’s surgery went fine.”

“Is dad coming?”

“He should be here soon.” Jack notices the baseball game playing on the screen, with the sound off. Walter’s eyes are attached to it. “You’ve been very brave.”

Walter looks at him. “I did what mom told me.” He frowns. “Are you scared?” 

“No,” Jack says. “No, I’m not.”

The boy nods, turns back to the TV. “That’s why you seem just fine then.”

 

 

 

**3x12**

 

Will waits until he and Alana reach the darkened parking lot under Quantico. “Did you know that Hannibal loved me?” he asks.

She goes still, but she’s not surprised. “How did you realize it?”

Will frowns. “I, uh, I needed some help,” he says. “And I expected clarity.”

“You have to admit it makes some sense,” she says.

“But it’s still a theoretical idea, no?” Will’s fingers twist in his pockets. “An absent spot on a radar, like a black hole. You know it’s there because it eats.”

Alana waits. “Are you okay?” she says.

Will looks away and nods.

 

 

 

**3x13**

 

Funerals occur when one is buried in the hearts of those that know them.

Will Graham has four of them.

 

 

**1.** The first happens in a Baltimore hospital. 

Jack Crawford finds Molly Graham’s room. Her shoulder is still in a sling, and her son sleeps on the couch. The news is playing on mute. Molly’s eyes are somewhat puffy and she taps the TV remote on her thigh silently.

Jack’s coat still smells of the emergency flares and the spilled gas from the crash site. He takes a seat.

“It’s probably not a good idea that we talk right now,” Molly says.

He nods. The news show footage from what the band at the bottom of the screen calls a national manhunt. “Will told us to tell the media that he had assisted Hannibal in escaping.”

Molly shuts her eyes. “It’s kind of funny how you just phrased that,” she says.

A moment stretches, and as it dilates, Jack becomes dimly aware of the thing that will one day have grown into guilt. “Whatever happened,” is what he says, “I’m sure he wanted you to know that.”

“Really? Sounds like you wanted me to,” Molly says.

 

 

**2.** The second takes place in some very dark waters.

“Be careful, alright?” his mother says.

Walter turns around. The wind breathes in the pines around the lake. It’s almost dawn. “Why? The ice is really thick,” he says.

Molly smiles. “Be careful anyway.”

Down the hole in the ice there are only some slivers of gray and indigo blue, then just dark things below. Walter opens the small polished, wooden box he has brought with him. He’s made sure they are all there. It’s snowed last week, but since then it’s been so cold that the snow is dry and rough. The lures shine on the ground.

Walter ties a weight to a fish line, and then he ties all the lures on it. It takes some time.

In total, there are seventeen lures. Walter puts the weight near the edge of the hole.

“You can say something if you’d like,” Molly says.

The boy shakes his head. He pushes the weight and watches the lure slide on the snow, then disappear in the water.

 

 

**3.** The third is at the lab.

Agents Price and Zeller are at the team’s meeting with the others. The only clue they have is the Hallmark’s birthday cards.

“With a key inside,” Jack repeats. “The key is found to lead to a locker. First was in a Kansas public pool. Second was in the MIT library. Last one was at an outfitter near the Canadian border. The locker has a map inside with a cross marking the location of a body.”

Jack paces in front of the pictures and the maps. He does not impose as much as he used to.

A muffled voice comes from the back. “Even Will Graham wouldn’t be able to figure this one out.”

Silence falls on the room. Zeller turns, but he can’t set his eyes on who’s said it.

Jack has heard. He stands very still. He doesn’t yell as much as he used to either.

Back at the lab, they pour themselves whisky in beakers. They toast over the third victim’s body. Neither of them says anything.

 

 

**4.** The fourth is featured in the tabloids.

“Agent Crawford. Agent Crawford!” Freddie Lounds calls out in the corridor. “Could Tattlecrime’s readers, by any chance, have a quote from you on the new room?”

Jack stops. “I was under the impression that you had been denied access to the opening, Miss Lounds,” he says.

Freddie Lounds gives Jack her widest smile. “Only to the press conference.”

The Evil Minds Museum is closed, only a few employees linger. Jack puts on his hat. “I can’t help you,” he says, over his shoulder. “You can say I didn’t agree with it.”

She fidgets with her camera, and returns to the entrance. To the new room that leads to all others.

Personally, she thinks it’s a bit overwhelming, but they went for realism, she figures. It’s a replica of Will Graham’s bedroom. Only it has better lighting. There are cards on the walls and furniture. The door to the kitchen leads the visitor to Hannibal Lecter’s kitchen. A nice touch.

But she’s certain Will Graham would also not agree.

 

 


	4. do you dream i (season one)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For [rav3nsta9](https://archiveofourown.org/users/effie_chan).

 

“Do you dream?” Will asks.

Outside, it’s started to snow in bursts and waves. Hannibal hasn’t stopped the music that was playing low when Will got in. Something from Schubert’s _Winterreise_. “Everyone does.”

“A lot of people say they don’t remember.”

Hannibal crosses his legs. “I remember.”

Will fidgets with the cuff of his flanel shirt. “Are they disturbing?”

For a moment, Will thinks Hannibal won’t answer. The psychiatrist doesn’t search for his eyes, but leans back and stares at the tall windows and the winter night beyond. “Sometimes. Not often.”

“Disturbing how?”

Hannibal smiles finely. “You consider yourself an authority in the disturbing, Will?”

“I don’t remember the last dream I had that wasn’t a nightmare,” Will says. “Also, yes. I’ve seen all there is to see.”

“Your expertise lies in the horrific. Nothing I can say will surprise you.”

Will tilts his head to the side, waits and eventually shakes his head. “It’s fine if you don’t want to answer. It’s a dumb question. Forget it.”

The young man opposite him stands from his seat and Hannibal knows he’s about to take his bag and coat, pretext the unexpected snowfall and leave. “It’s not a dumb question,” he says. He folds his hands on his lap and recounts in details what he’s begun to see, more and more often since he had met Will, nearly every night, even though his deep sleep cycles are shorter than most. “A few days after I met you for the first time, I dreamed that my right eye had gone blind. In the dream, I went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and a minuscule version of you was covering the iris and blocking the pupil.” Will’s raptured eyes don’t leave him. “You were trying to get out and at last you pushed my eye out of its socket. The last thing I remember is holding the fallen eye in my hand and staring at myself from its point of view.”

Will sits back down slowly. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“What part?”

Will doesn’t answer immediately. On the disk, the song ends with a long, single piano note. “Was there blood?” he asks.

Hannibal recalls the trails of it down his cheek in the mirror. “Yes,” he says. “It didn’t hurt.” He lets his tongue settle against the roof of his mouth. He longs to tell Will about the other dreams, in which he is torn apart by Will’s bare hands to discover there is another set of skin and organs within – in which Will swallows him and inside his stomach, Hannibal finds himself in the belly of a Florence church – in which he runs through the Wolf Trap woods, pursued by a creature that combines Will’s dogs in a mythical monster. He says nothing. “Is it strange to think you can be in the dreams of others?”

It’s Will’s turn to stare outside, almost numbly. Finally, he nods slowly. “Do you discuss that with your psychiatrist?”

“No,” Hannibal says. “I don’t think I have ever mentioned it to anyone.”


	5. do you dream ii (season one)

 

After a third episode of losing time, Will comes to Hannibal’s office, on a Wednesday evening. Hannibal asks him if he knows what time it is, Will shakes his head vigourously and says, “I don’t even know what sleep is anymore. Everything feels like it.” Hannibal listens to him gravely, sitting at his desk, while the younger man recounts the mixing of reality, dream and hallucinations he experiences now, pacing between the two empty chairs. Once Will stops and sits down, hands limp on the arms of the chair, head barely held up, light shivers going through him, Hannibal crouches before him and explains the need for more agressive methods. He is patient and steady. Will takes the words in and gradually stops shaking his head.

“Hypnosis,” he says. “Listen to my voice, close your eyes, and all that?”

Hannibal’s smile is worried and careful. “If your level of stress is as high as I believe it to be, there won’t be any need for this kind of guidance initially. Just stare at the light, Will.”

“Like a dog looking at the headlights of a car, right? Blind to the irony of his death.”

“Also like one who’s fallen into a well and who looks up at the light, for salvation,” Hannibal says. “I will not let you be buried, Will.”

As predicted, Will’s cortex is weakened by the infection already. The first round of light stimulation triggers a seizure within four minutes, the second round in only two and a half. The third is more interesting.

Will comes in with a high fever. Hannibal sets the light in place, feels Will’s pulse on his wrist, two fingers under the cuff of the younger man’s shirt, and times the oscillating lamp to Will’s heart, beating with haste, rushing toward death.

Sitting down in his seat, opposite Will, Hannibal watches the echoes of the light on the other man’s features. They outline the bones of his skull underneath the skin and Hannibal sees the dream emerge even if his eyes aren’t closed, Will slowly stripping of his skin, until he attempts to dismantle his own bones and can’t, asking if Hannibal can’t do it for him.

At a moment, Will stills. Hannibal tilts his head, expecting the seizure to begin. But the profiler cocks his head on the side and asks him if he’s dreaming.

“Me or you?”

“Could be your dream,” Will says. “Feels like you.”

Hannibal leans forward in his chair. “What does that feel like?”

“Order. Depth. Secret,” Will lists. He twists his fingers on the arms of the chair, extended and curled, testing. He turns to Hannibal. The sweat on his brow is cooling and drying. “What’s happening to me?”

“The way you interact with the world changes, gradually, until the world is but a veil you can walk through,” Hannibal says. He slides out of his chair, clicks off the light and reaches for Will’s chin. Turning it toward the desk lamp, he peers at Will’s pupils, not contracting, wider than normal. Will looks at him and his eyes turn to observing slits, like his own. Hannibal smiles and Will mirrors the smile. Hannibal stops smiling. “You’re having a complex partial seizure, Will.”

“It’s not good.”

“It’s quite fine, in fact.”

“Is it what you expected?”

“We’re in your dream, Will,” Hannibal says. “I am only here as an instantiation of your imagination. My expectations are yours.”

Will frowns. His hands close and open in an automatism. “Then, you want me to die.”

“You have no desire to die.”

The lucidity of Will’s eyes is frightening. Hannibal starts to believe he has opened a crack in Will’s mind that goes into the brain and right through to the soul underneath, and it spills. “I guess I’m indifferent.”

“There’s no such thing as indifference to death,” Hannibal says.

“Well, I’m scared. But why should I be afraid of the daylight if it’s everything like the night?”

Hannibal closes his fingers on Will’s wrist again. His pulse is more rapid now, fluttering. The psychiatrist listens for skipped intervals and beats. Will’s hand slips away from his when the younger man gets up. He walks clumsily to the patient exit door and Hannibal follows him.

Outside, Will doesn’t leaves the stone path that leads to the street and turns right. Their steps sink in the few inches of snow and leave black marks behind. At the back of Hannibal’s office is a small courtyard, with a few trees, a bench, leaveless bushes. Will stops there and seems to waver for a moment, before sinking to his knees in the snow. “You know,” he says, his head hanging, as if he is speaking to the ground under him, “I don’t think _I’m_ dreaming.”

Hannibal stops beside Will and sits, cross-legged, by him. The snow is only crisply cold against his pants, but it will thaw. “Then how do you describe this?” Hannibal gestures at them.

“I think I’m in one of your dreams.”

Taking in the black brick facades of similar, closed office buildings around them, partly hidden behind the bare trees, Hannibal wonders for a moment if Will is right. “I die in those dreams, almost always. You dismember me and scatter the parts,” he points out.

Will shakes his head. His pants are thoroughly wet with melted snow. He quivers visibly. “Are you afraid of me?”

“If I were, I would be open to the fact that it wouldn’t be disagreeable.” Hannibal’s clothes are wet as well. Short erratic bouts of wind make him colder yet, but he stays where he is.

“What happens to me? Do I die with you?” Will asks.

Hannibal shakes his head calmly. “You are the cause and then the witness of my death, or my suffering.”

“Never the other way around?”

“Why?”

“It’s okay,” Will says. “If you want to kill me, it’s fine.” Looking at Hannibal, as if he could see him for what he is, Will adds: “You’re right, this is my dream.” He points at Hannibal, almost touches the sleeve of his suit jacket with a finger. “Your suit is wet.”

The words fall from Will’s lips and his mouth hangs open for a moment, before, finally, his eyes roll back in his head. He falls in the snow at Hannibal’s side. Hannibal tilts his head up at the night above them and waits for the seizure to stop. Once it does, Will’s clothing is starched in snow, some dried grass clinging to him. There’s a trace of mud on his cheek: Hannibal wipes it away with his thumb. Then, he carries him inside and sedates him for the ride back to Wolf Trap.


	6. post-finale motel + minor smut

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first Hannibal piece, ever, written shortly after my seeing the finale.

 

At the third motel, Hannibal went to the cash, as he always did. With the hood of the sweater pulled over his head, he looked nothing like his prison picture, nor like his previous self. Intently, each time, Will watched him change his bearing, slump a little, take his shoulders in until he seemed older than he was, until the light of tranquil, sleeping pride in his eyes was dimmed to nothing. He thickened his accent and Will too, he thought, couldn’t have told he was Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal asked for a room with two beds. They had none left and it was too cold to sleep in the car.

They walked into the room guided by the specks of light coming from the street light outside. Will clicked on a lamp and took in the brown furniture, the faded pink and turquoise flowers on the comforter, the tall licks of the carpet’s beige wool under his feet when he slipped off his shoes, motions stiff and slow now that the door was closed behind them.

“I’ll take the couch,” Hannibal said. 

Since they had been washed on the beach, it had been like this. As they had healed, first through the early days of bright pain and pink, still gaping wounds, then during the careful times of bandages, stitches, painkillers and liquid diet that had followed, Will had always expected Hannibal to want to return to the shapes of his past life : elaborate food presented in fashion that suggested mystical undertones, music that nurtured the soul with melodies that whispered doom, murders that painted what this same soul couldn’t contain. All his life a case holding the jewel that Hannibal held himself to be.

But when they had started to run, Hannibal had seemed content to dress in whatever clothes they would steal, eat peanut butter spread on white bread once they could tolerate solids, be quiet most of the time. At first, Will had thought it was another elaborate test: let Will lead to see if he would only leave again or lead them back to Jack Crawford. He had let Hannibal test him. But now, in the motel room that smelled faintly of cigarette and mold, as Hannibal brought a folded blanket to the couch, it didn’t seem like a test.

It seemed like Will was the jewel. And Hannibal was the case, hiding him from sight. The scariest thing with Hannibal had always been the flicker of selflessness, showing only in contrast to maximum narcissism, these words that sounded true when they talked of what Will would become.

Will knew the name of that now.

He shook his head. “The couch is miserable. Take the bed.”

“The bed is also miserable,” Hannibal said. “Your shoulder will worsen if you’re not flat on your back.”

Will breathed out and kept his eyes down on his bag. “Then take the bed with me.” He pulled out a fresh t-shirt and socks. “You’ve been in my head for so long. You could be under my skin or in my clothes, I’m sure it wouldn’t make much difference.” 

Placing the folded blanket down, Hannibal nodded shortly.

–

A little after one AM, Will was woken by the beaming headlights of a car coming through the window. His right arm wandered down the side of the bed, into his bag and found the knife under the clothes and meds. Hannibal’s hand crept from his left and spread, flat, on the center of his chest, holding him down.

“They’re drunk. They are loud, but I’m sure they will soon be on their way to their own room,” he explained softly.

They listened together in the dark. A man and a woman, talking like there was blaring music playing around them. It was a mix of spanish and english, shifting back and forth. For a time, they stood in front of their car, smoking maybe. Hannibal’s hand was still just above his sternum, on the soft place where the ribs didn’t protect the organs underneath. The perfect spot to cave in, pierce the skin and search for the bleeding life inside. Will’s hand was still wrapped around the knife.

To stab Hannibal with the knife, he only needed to swing his right arm above him in a circle. It could be swift. But it was his life now. Killing him now, would be like adopting a dog, then changing your mind the next day, drive him ten miles from your home and leave him with his leash loosely tied to a pole on the side of the street. Will had commited. The thought of his dogs made his eyes burn with tears.

The couple outside left and Will’s fatigue returned in one, plodding wave. He felt Hannibal’s fingers shift on his chest for a moment, study his breathing, before they pulled away entirely.

–

Waking up to the shiny morning, Will pushed himself up against the pillow. Like it did all mornings, his right arm had the awkward more than numbness and not yet pain. Hannibal was in the corner of the room, preparing breakfast. Between the inate familiarity of the setting and the warmth Will felt in the sheets beside him, the thoughts rapidly coalesced into a feeling, than another, than another, like they would before a crime scene. Now, he was the crime, broken and torn, chewed by the rocks of the cliff. “Freddie Lounds suggested I do it,” he said.

Hannibal ripped open a shining package of ground coffee and fanned the paper filter out. “Do what precisely?”

“Sleep with you.” 

The other man’s hands stilled briefly, then resumed their motions. “Did you consider it?”

_Will scoffed. “No. It’s…” he said. “It’s not like that.”_

_The red-haired woman looked at him, unperturbed, a knowing smile on her lips. She quirked her brow equivocally. “It is often – like that. As cynical as it may sound.” And again, Will remembered the dream of his hands closing around her neck, the dream he had had just the night after her fake death. He had woken up feeling good, relieved, some strain gone from his mind._

“She thought it would have been less dangerous,” Will said.

Hannibal didn’t turn back. “You don’t seem the type. You value danger for what it is,” he said.

Not taking his eyes off the sheets, Will was lost in their shapes. Hannibal didn’t tangle them at his feet like Will did, even the ruffles seemed patterned and harmonious. “You’re not a danger anymore.”

–

They had planned to stay at this motel for one more night, then head north-west. During his years as an FBI trainee, Will had participated in a case in the state of Washington. A handful of unsolved murders, all at a cabin in the mountains. Because of a legal struggle between the Bureau and the victims’ families, it had never been sold. Last time Will had checked, it was still sealed up. They could stay there for the rest of the winter. There was nothing ahead of “winter” that was not abstract, dots in space, linked with lines, floating. The future had never proved a good home for Will. It was easy to read into the hopes and dreams of others, where they saw themselves going. But for now, the present was so dense and thick, like a river of mud.

It was well into the night. Will had woken up some time ago and sleep wasn’t coming back. Sometimes, time seemed to speed up, or slow down, but he was mostly conscious. Beside him, Hannibal was awake, one of his arm placidly lying on his stomach. Will didn’t know if he had slept at all.

“Where did you keep her?” Hannibal asked.

“They have quarters for protected witnesses in Quantico.”

“Did you talk with her often?”

“No. She wanted to speak to me,” Will said. “Was wondering what was taking so long. Suggested that I… speed things up.” He could make out Hannibal’s features, on the pillow, in the night. “I’m glad I didn’t do it.”

Turning on his uninjured side, Hannibal freed his left hand from the sheets and blankets and brought it to Will’s face, stroking one curl of hair in place behind his ear. “So am I.”

–

Will had fallen asleep with Hannibal’s hand in his hair.

He woke on his left side. He often did. It rested his shoulder. Hannibal was pressed tightly against his back, his arms curled against his own stomach, his forehead against Will’s neck. He stirred when Will woke. But Will didn’t move and closed his eyes, and they both stayed still. The sunlight intensified as dawn became morning.

Eyes attached to the thick beige blinds, Will concentrated on the beating of his heart, slow and tireless. For some time, he expected Hannibal to talk. Then he felt the other man’s hand rest on his ribcage. At first, it was only weight and warmth, then it turned into grip and slowly pulled Will against Hannibal’s chest, bodies aligned.

Will tilted his head backward and Hannibal lodged his cheek in the crook of his neck. He pulled on the collar of Will’s t-shirt to place close-mouthed kisses on the skin, from shoulder to neck.

Closing his eyes, because it felt like exactly the right thing in exactly the right way, like it would break if he kept them open, Will covered Hannibal’s hand with his own and pushed it to his stomach, spooning them completely together.

After this, everything ravelled. Will would remember the sheets he held onto. Hannibal slipped his hand under Will’s t-shirt, light on the skin, then brought it to Will’s cock, half-hard and caressed, first, then stroked.

Will’s hand joined Hannibal’s only to tighten the grip of his fingers. Hannibal sighed in his neck. Twisting around, Will searched for the other man’s mouth. They kissed, breezy and warm, then messy, as Hannibal kept stroking. Will began to shudder and slipped his boxers down, so that Hannibal could slot his cock between the cheeks and move.

–

They settled into the car a little before ten, that morning. Hannibal had a certain glow about him. Will meant to say something about the next exit. Instead, he said, “I love you.”

In the passenger seat, Hannibal turned away to stare outside. “You say it as if you were admitting guilt.”

Will kept his eyes on the road in front of them. “I am guilty.”


	7. hannipenguin AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [byk23](https://byk23.tumblr.com/)'s [Hannipenguin stories](http://hannipenguin.tumblr.com/), with Bedelia as a mantis instead of as a cat (Alana being a zebra, Hannibal being a penguin and Will a mongoose).

 

Hannibal advanced carefully, so as to muffle the smooching noise his webbed feet made on the floor of the side-entrance to Will’s classroom: he meant this as a surprise. In between his wings, he craddled a ceramic pot holding various raw meats (deer for its deep red matching the bright pink of salmon) arranged around fruits, nuts, eggs and a chopped human tongue disposed in a curve he would present as tartare, with a homemade mayonnaise. The ensemble recreated the garden featured in the tale of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, where the mongoose had fearlessly protected the family against the attacks of cobras, with the tartare as the slaughtered snake and the deer centerpiece as the victorious mongoose.

But Hannibal came to a brutal halt when he heard the sweet voice of their common zebra friend, Alana. He peeked around the corner and saw them talking, Will sitting on his desk, one of his paws stroking his tail nervously, while Alana blinked slowly and awaited his answers.

“Where did you see him, Will? I don’t recall anyone new here.”

“He was just… walking around. Strong and proud like he belonged here.”

“A stag, you say?” She huffed loudly and bumped her nose against Will’s ear. “I’d know if there was a stag around. He’d smell me. Show me his big antlers and stuff.”

“You’re a zebra.”

She shrugged. “I’m not into stags anyway.”

Will looked down at the edge of his tiny feet. “He had feathers, in a deep black like a raven.”

The zebra flexed her front leg pensively. “Did he speak with you? Tell you anything?”

“He’s in my head, isn’t he?”

Alana didn’t say anything, only flapped her short tail in the air.

No need to say, Hannibal was devastated. He stepped back around the corner, glad no one had seen him. Parts of his soul warred against each other. If this stag was real, he should be killed for having clearly tried to steal Will’s friendship from him. The common fight and victory could bring them closer, finally, and open Will to the possibility of murder of larger preys. If he was not, then Will’s mind should be investigated in order to make sure an imaginary friend was not all the more trying to rapture him, and away from Hannibal, into insanity.

–

Bedelia the mantis sat gracefully, her two first pairs of front legs crossed at a harmonious angle before her.

“And how did you react, when you learned of Will's” – she hesitated  – “new friend?”

“I wanted to offer him better meals.”

“To regain his friendship?”

“And drive him to release his savage impulses for hunt.”

Bedelia pondered the remark. “I’m curious. Have you considered opening to Will about your plans regarding the egg?”

Hannibal jumped down from his seat and loped over to the window, crossing his wings behind his back to peer outside. They were in the thick of Winter. Come Spring, the egg would crack open and reveal their child. Will would be ready by then. “I named it.”

The mantis hissed suspiciously. “The egg?”

“Yes. It is a child already. It deserved a name. Abigail.”

“The name its murderous father had intended?”

“If I share my plans regarding the egg with Will, do you believe he would agree to disregard the ravenstag’s friendship and return under my wing?”

Bedelia cocked her head in reaction to the wing pun, unamused, but consumed by a dimly burning fascination. “It may not be wise to propose Will with an intimate commitment while he doubts his own sanity.”

“Mongooses form stable families.”

“As penguins do,” the mantis approved gravely. Then she remarked, “This mongoose’s distress genuinely troubles you.”

“What if the stag’s friendship could ease his distress but not mine?”

“Then wouldn’t you be happy, as a friend, to see him at peace, even through another?”

The penguin stiffened. It was far too dry here for his taste. He should go back home and watch the egg in its temporary, ever-warming incubator. “The stag is not a good friend for Will,” he said. “But he could be a good foe.”

–

Will got out of the blankets in his nest and hushed the dogs.

The stag was here. He knew it. It had followed him from Quantico and the city, all the way to Wolftrap. Who was he? What did he want?

Moved by fear, for the dogs and for himself, but drawn as well, he slid silently, predatorously across the living room, fur thickened by intense focus.

He met the stag on the porch. It seemed to wait for him. It looked quite blue in the moonlight. “Are you a dream?” Will asked it.

The stag tilted his head on the side, apparently inviting Will to join him for a walk in the nearby forest.

“Are you my friend?” Will asked, stepping closer to the beast, taller and broader as he approached.

But the stag turned and walked away. Will followed it until they had reached the first trees, running fiercely on his short legs. The stag walked into the woods, seeming to blend in with the branches and the leaves. Will turned back to look at his house, tiny in the distance. He hesitated, thought of the dogs, knew of the wolves and the coyotes in the forest. But when he turned his head back, the stag had disappeared.  


	8. scar worshipping hannibal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Around Futamono, NSFWish.

Hannibal’s hand was still in her hair. He placed soft kisses there before rolling off of her. They nestled on their sides, facing each other, legs tangled. She ran her hand on his chest, paler than the skin, darker than the white and gray there. This was when she noticed the tiny red drops on the sheet between them.

“You’re bleeding,” Alana said.

Unfolding his arm from under their shared pillow, Hannibal watched the streak of blood coming from an undone stitch at the end of the scar on his right arm. It trailed down his wrist and spotted the white silk of the sheets. He sat up in bed.

“You should call the clinic.”

He shook his head, eyes attached to the wound. “It will be faster if I do it myself.”

“Hannibal,” Alana started.

He kissed her forehead. “I’ll be fine,” he said, clasping his hand tightly over the stitches. “In particular. And in general,” he whispered near her ear.

“Let me help.”

He shook his head again and slipped out of bed, heading to the bathroom.

Alana got up and slipped on one of his clean shirt, crisp white, left there as if it were meant for her to take. “Where are your sheets? I’ll change them.”

He pointed her to the door left of the fireplace and disappeared in the en suite.

The thread and needle were in the common medical kit he kept here. He looked at his right forearm. Mr Brown’s technique had been crude, but sincere, filled with his love and admiration for Will, as enthusiastic as a young lover and yet as aggressive as a jealous one. The cuts ran deep, not enough to cause a major hemorrhage, only enough to provoke weakness. Remembering his knees wobbling on the wooden bucket, he felt the same rush of all things – apprehension, love and anger, undistinguishably mingled at the thought that Will had set his mind on him in such a personal way.

On his forearm, the blood had dried. The cut was an angry burgundy red, its edges swollen around the black stitches. One stitch was torn near the end. It had created a small gap of flesh. It was enough that Hannibal could press the tip of his left index finger inside, causing a fresh surge of blood to ooze out. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back. Maybe Will would have done this himself, seizing the opportunity to cause pain and watch it ripple, without endangering life.

He let out the breath he had been holding. Probably not. Will had no taste for suffering in half-measures. Nor did he. He pulled his finger out. 

Taking his fingertip to his mouth, he sucked the blood from it, then he placed his lips on those of the scar and tongued the rest away.

The flesh was significantly more swollen now. The pain was blazing, running up to his shoulder. Wrapped like a protective hand around his heart.

By the time he had stitched the wound, his renewed erection had subsided.

He went back in the room to find Alana smoothing the blue coverlet in place. She gestured to his arm. “That must hurt.”

“I would prefer to have a glass of wine and skip the painkillers.” He smiled. “If you’ll join me, of course.”

She smiled back and nodded, worry not entirely gone. He put on pajama pants and went downstairs to fetch a bottle of Bourgogne. In the dark kitchen, he went left into the pantry and retrieved two Xanax from a hidden case. He crushed them in a mortar, dropped the powder at the bottom of Alana’s glass and poured the wine.

Later, while waiting for Alana’s sleep to deepen sufficiently, he lay on his back and rubbed the scar, thinking of the fishing flies in their case, in the basement. He pressed against the new stitches. Some pain erupted and it craddled him in a dull satisfaction. He considered stitching the wound using fishing line as thread after retrieving Gideon from the hospital.

But he would probably lack time.

He searched for the tumbling shadows coursing on the ceiling as Alana’s breathing softened.


	9. post-fromage talk + wound stitching

 

Once the interior, glass-walled doors of the Chandel Square house closed behind him, Will didn’t know exactly what to do. The bowels suspended over tanks to empty and dry refused to leave his mind. Even if he closed his eyes, his own stomach felt taut and sick. Hannibal turned to him with a smile and pointed at a bowl on a table. After a split second, Will understood and placed the car keys into it.

The Bentley’s leather seats had been even softer than he had imagined. Dr. Lecter couldn’t drive with his injured right leg, but Will had felt out of place throughout the ride from the psychatrist's office.

Will’s thoughts went to his wounded hand and the numbed down but continuous hum in his right ear. The EMTs had assured him his eardrum was fine. Hannibal left through a door on the left, forcing Will to follow him in the kitchen, even if only to call a cab.

The psychiatrist turned on the lights over the kitchen counters and a soft golden glow illuminated the granite countertops when Will walked in. “Should I expect an Agent or FBI employee to come here tomorrow for my deposition,” he said, cringing visibly as he bent down to take something from a cupboard. “Or should I go myself to the Quantico offices?”

While Will processed the question, struggling to take his mind away from the images of white innards curled like lace, Hannibal placed the medical emergency kit he had retrieved down on the island between them. “From the sound of it, Jack will want to do it himself,” Will said. “You can set up an appointment with him.”

Hannibal opened the kit. “Very well.”

Will watched him take out alcohol swabs and unbutton his right cuff. “The last time I killed someone, I ended up in therapy,” Will said.

A fine smile formed on Hannibal’s lips. It reopened the cut there. He touched his thumb to it and wiped the thin streak of blood in his pocket square, already stained with some blood and the memory of achieving the set-up for Budges’ death. “I didn't need to kill anyone to get a therapist.”

“Will you talk to her about it?”

“I don’t know yet,” Hannibal pondered.

He had finished rolling up his right sleeve. The EMTs had cleaned some of the blood away on the cut left by the cord, but the tissue was deeply indented. He placed the thread, clamp and curved needle beside the alcohol swab. “Are you going to stitch yourself up?”

“The technicians encouraged me to go to the hospital tomorrow about it, but I find it much simpler to do it myself,” Hannibal explained. He nodded to the white bandage on Will’s hand. “He used a weapon crafted from what resembled a piano string on me. Did he use the same on you?”

“Something that had a couple of strings and handles,” Will said. “He strangled an officer with it.” Will brought his uninjured hand to his forehead, then took off his glasses. “Then he drowned him.”

A bottle of scotch had appeared on the island countertop, near Will’s glasses, along with two short tumblers. Hannibal poured a himself a glass, downed it, then poured another one for himself and one for Will. Will’s hand curled around the thick base of the tumbler.

“You killed someone and you seem fine,” he said, eyes on the skin of the right wrist that Hannibal cleaned dutifully where the cord had dug in the most.

Hannibal paused, placed the swab aside. “Our cases are different. I defended myself, I barely had time to understand what was happening,” Hannibal said, fitting the thread in the eye of the needle. “You were in pursuit of a killer whom you had profiled and whom you precisely sought to understand.”

“Only to catch him. Not as an end in itself.”

The needle pierced the skin near the gash. Will looked away as if this was personal. Except for a twitch of Hannibal’s lips, there was no visible manifestation of pain. “Of course. Nonetheless, all these were rational actions.”

Will smiled. “Most of the time, it seems as far from reason as can be and up there with the fluttering dreams of death.”

The first three stitches were done, blood beading around them. “Could I ask you to hold this, please?” Hannibal asked. Will took the needle and thread while Hannibal cut it with sharp scissors. He had not seen anything in Tobias Budge, no motive, no feelings, only a methodical search of means to achieve craftsmanship, to master and dominate. All of it felt very slick, very determinate, very rational. Nothing more rational, something whispered in Will, than to use the materials available to us to produce art, or cause death.

“Will,” Hannibal’s voice shook him from his thoughts. “Please,” he said again, gesturing to the needle Will still held.

“Sorry,” Will mumbled, handing the needle back. He stepped back from the kitchen island and finished his glass, loneliness descending in his throat with the burn of the alcohol.


	10. tome-wan no kissing

Hannibal wiped his hand as best he could on Will’s chair, then he pulled the gloves off. Still watching Mason, slumped and wheezing, a sodden washcloth, Will heard Hannibal take his vest and shirt off behind him. When he turned around, Hannibal had fetched a plain black flannel from Will’s drawer and put it on. The sleeves stopped just above his wrist bones.

Through the rushing headache and the smell of death throbbing in the room, Will knew that he should wash his hands.

On his way to the kitchen, he stopped by Hannibal. He stepped in so that they almost touched. “Why here?” he said. “Of all places, why here?”

Hannibal placed his palm flat on Will’s chest, in the center, a little to the left. “Because it’s where your heart is.”

Will stared at Hannibal’s naked chest, revealed by the unbuttoned shirt tails. Was something inside this beating as well?

Feeling like the pieces inside him swayed in place, he leaned forward until his forehead rested against Hannibal’s cheek. “I think you ate my heart.”

A moment passed, during which Hannibal breathed warmth in Will’s hair. “Even I could not host all the vibrancy it contains.”

Their noses touched as Will tilted his head back up. For a few seconds, they stayed like this, one mind of lightlessness.

Then Hannibal pushed him back softly.

“I had a dream,” Will said, eyes down on his hands covered with some of his own dried blood from the cut on his forehead. A straw of pork litter was caught in the cuff of his coat. “That I sliced you open from collarbone to navel. Like you did to that man with the flowers.” Buttoning the shirt slowly, Hannibal gave a light smile. “There were no organs inside of you,” Will went on. “You grasped my head and told me that they’d been eaten. You were whispering, like it was a secret.”

“When we end up being eaten, it is often by something we created ourselves.” Hannibal took his eyes to Mason. “Some more literally than others.” When he turned back to Will, his eyes had a gleam. It only approximated the rapture that had been there a moment before. “It would be wise to wash and dispose of your clothes,” he said.

Will nodded. Behind him, Buster was licking at a rivulet of blood on Mason Verger’s left shoe. It started at the unconscious man’s face, continued through his shirt, pooled near his belt, then went underneath his pants, to reappear, gushing, near his ankle.

In the second floor bathroom, Will washed his hands and forearms up to the elbows, like surgeons do. Even in the clear light, there was no trace of Hannibal’s handprint on Will’s coral shirt.

Years later, whenever he would find himself in front of his bathroom mirror, his mind would go back to this moment. It was not the moment when he waited for Hannibal to leave, then called Jack to tell him about the evidence left in his living room. It was not the moment either when he rolled his shirt into a ball, then brought it to the BAU for analysis. It was not when he told them to look there for Hannibal Lecter’s fingerprints and maybe, just maybe, some minute traces of latex with them, that would match the one of the gloves the Ripper always used.

It was the moment when he fitted his hand on his chest, where Hannibal’s had been, and thought, “What if it’s me who has his heart?”

He turned on the shower. When he stepped out, he put his dirty shirt back on. He went downstairs to find Hannibal, Mason Verger and the bloodstained armchair gone. The section of dirtied carpet had been cut out efficiently and rolled up. The dogs were out.

A fire had been started in the fireplace, the flames growing high from feeding on Hannibal’s fine clothing. Alone in the night, Will finally took off his shirt and put it to burn with the rest.


	11. dreaming drinking hannibal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for [@hannibalcreative](http://hannibalcreative.tumblr.com/)‘s #DrunkenKisses (... from Summer 2016).

Will has not crossed his legs, but he has laced his fingers together in his lap at some fluttering point in the past that Hannibal cannot recall. “Has this happened before?”

“That I eviscerated someone?” Hannibal asks back. Will doesn’t flinch, doesn’t try to hold his insides in. They have spilled on him, his thighs, the seat in Hannibal’s office. The one Hannibal would normally sit in. “Yes.”

“That you didn’t know the exact outcome the wound inflicted.”

Hannibal pivots his head slowly to look at the window, mimicking Will’s very wish to escape as he had sat here, in this chair, so often. “Wounds can have many consequences. Flesh is one of the things that we comprehend the least. It blinds us and it can be affected with microbes and infection that we don’t see.”

More pleasant than Hannibal’s remembers him, Will shakes his head. “Yes. Molecules, vibrations, conversations,” he recites. “And all that. You deviate.”

He nods. “Maybe, yes.”

On Will, the blood is darker than the chair’s black and Hannibal can feel its warmth emanating.

Hannibal grips the arms of the chair and searches for precise words. They are not usually hard to find. But there is no one to dupe here. He can hear Will answering: you can dupe yourself, Hannibal, but not me. “Perhaps I did not know what I wished to inflict exactly as well as I did what I wished to express.”

Will smiles. There is no kindness in it. “Therapeutic art is always tricky.”

Licking the healed lip he remembers Jack splitting during their fight, Hannibal nods in approval. “It often results in a lack of balance between content and form. Reveals the soul only as it sees itself.”

On Will’s lap, his forearms are bathed in the red that spills out. He gazes aside for a moment, then changes his strategy. “The last person you gutted. Tell me about them.”

“He was nothing like you,” Hannibal says. Will echoes the negative identification with a smile. “An insurance examiner. I detached the skin from the peritoneum so as to preserve the structure of the intestines even if the other organs spilled out.”

“You skinned his middle to provide bowel for sausages,” Will reformulates.

“Yes.”

The walls of the office wobble around them with the sound of a delicate step. Will archs an eyebrow. “Session’s over. Maybe we’ll get the papers this time.”

Hannibal opens his eyes to where they have stilled over the piano keys. In the doorway to their Paris apartment kitchenette, he glimpses Bedelia. She undoes the clips that hold her hat firmly in her hair. It is windy and it has rained last night while he listened, a hand splayed on his stomach.

He listens to the bottle of wine being set down on the counter. He can smell mushrooms and fresh herbs as well.

She joins him and says, “I didn’t take the paper.”

He nods slowly.

She starts toward her room – Mrs. Fell’s room. “Why not consult Tattlecrime? Your curiosity-…”

“Would be entertained, not satisfied.”

–

Months later, he will look at the Tattlecrime website, search the pages tagged Will Graham. The pictures of him, yellow, skinny and naked, eyes closed above the respirator’s mask, would stay with him. At that point, he will have begun to wonder, if his palace has not transformed into a rampaging knight, all wood, stone and gushing memories, to pursue him in the world.

In the meantime, every day, Bedelia goes to the market. Sometimes, Hannibal instructs or expresses a wish. Mostly, she chooses the products and he executes. On the first day, she returned with American newspapers, detailing the terrifying events that were not even a day old. Ex-Special Agent Will Graham’s condition, it said, remains critical after his transfer to the Johns Hopkins intensive care unit. He is at a crossroad between life and death.

He had piled them by the fire. Page by page, day after day, they dried and he fed them to the flames.

She has since stopped buying the papers.

–

“I was under the impression you had visited Italy,” he says. They are sitting with pains au chocolat between them. The coffee cooks on the stove. Hannibal runs a finger along the curved back of a silver spoon, plunged neck deep in apricot jam. Dr. Fell had most excellent tastes: the confiture has been cooked with the kernels extracted from the fruits’ pits, giving it a marzipan taste.

“Only the North, and as a teenager. It was an organized outing, supervised by Augustinian nuns,” she says. She seems distracted. “It was… monastic. I only remember churches, aware and silent.”

“You’re away, Dr. Du Maurier,” he notes.

She pours them both coffee. She sips hers. “He is out of intensive care unit since yesterday. Rehabilitation will be necessary, but they expect a full recovery within a year.”

Hannibal’s eyes stay on the metallic waves of the spoon, the jam, the table. A year. Time should flex and envelop him like a cocoon. Instead, it penetrates him and he welcomes it as hunger leaves him, suddenly.

–

He sits cross-legged before the fire in Paris, a wine glass at his side. And he sits in his Baltimore office.

From time to time, he gets up from the patient seat and paces the room, like Will used to. Perhaps the steps would lead him somewhere, out of his mind, or inside it.

His thoughts wander and he holds them back, even if they must strain and break into shards.

He paces again. In his usual seat, the pooled blood has dried and rotten.

–

He visits Abigail in the Port Haven clinic.

They play chess and sometimes she reads to him. Sometimes, he reads. She is on her bed and the scarf on her neck darkens and the scar is no longer a scar.

Around them, the plants die as blood fills the room up to the windows.

–

He goes to Will’s classroom and finds the door closed and locked. In the corridor on his left, steps hurry away. He recognizes Will, naturally. How could he lose that.

Yet, when he follows the noise, the hall is empty.

–

It isn’t clear how he finds himself in Wolf Trap.

Will is on the porch among his dogs. His gray t-shirt and dark pants are dirtied with vivid traces of paint and darker spots of varnish. A wooden chair stands on a large white cloth. Will kneels beside it, running polish over the wood to renew the dye. The smell is entirely strange and fetid.

“You want a drink?” Will says.

Hannibal nods and next there is the tall tree before Will’s house. The shadows of its leaves dot the ground in a green like a deep ocean. Hannibal sits on the steps with a glass in his hand.

Will sips. “Oh, this is your stuff,” he says.

“Balvenie. 25 years.”

Winston sleeps beside Will, nose on his thigh. “Nothing here that isn’t you,” he says. “Not wondering where the wound is gone?”

Eyeing Will’s stomach, Hannibal swallows. “It will reappear eventually.”

“Where from? Will it materialize on my skin directly from your memory? Do you remember the twitches of your wrists with enough precision to know what shape it would take?”

Hannibal smiles and flexes his hand, fingers like iron.

The bottle is between them and they drink. The dogs come and go. For hours, Hannibal thinks of the weight of the blade in his hand.

–

A scar is like a last sheet of varnish on a painting. It can transform the work underneath, make it immortal or smother it.

Perhaps the surgeons have clasped the skin with a stretch to it. Perhaps Will has lost so much weight, his abdomen has caved in slightly. Perhaps were other surgeries necessary, drains for abcesses, an opening for the colostomy bag.

Memories swirl around him. Only they are not from the past. They are hopes, he realizes as he gets to his feet. They are heavy, heading ahead as somnambulists would, feet dragging and blind to their own sleep.

He is still in Wolf Trap. The bottle is empty and Will is gone.

The dogs, he finds in the living room, where they should be.

Will is in the bathroom. He stands motionless in front of the mirror. Hannibal can see that he has rucked his t-shirt up to see the scar. He moves forward as stealthily as he can, but Will hears him because they are one mind.

When Will turns around, he isn’t Will any longer: his face his gone. There is nothing there but skin, flat, hard as the bone underneath. Will backs him into the wall and nothing looks at Hannibal, face to face. The head tilts forward and touches his cheek, his mouth, his nec and he reaches back.

The curved blade has returned in Hannibal’s hand.

He wakes with traces of swallowed wine on his tongue. The fire is out.

–

The train brings them to Florence and Hannibal feels undone in the way he expected. The sentiment is contained in the controlled channels and prairies of his mind. It searches for its place in the rooms and it finds it. At his side, Bedelia has her head turned, looking at the train station employees, chatting behind the thick windows of the cash.

He thinks that the city will never leave him. He has eaten it already.

–

When he returns to his office, he walks by the patient seat and goes to his own instead. The rumbling has stopped. The seat is still warm under him and, filled with the vibration of all it holds, it shatters in splinters and light and the warmth of Will’s blood is like a blanket.


	12. 2x07 scars and dinner

When Hannibal asks him to dinner, Will thinks it’s so he can show him the scars on his arms. In his home’s kitchen, Hannibal does roll up his shirtsleeves and there they are – fresh, pink, pierced with black thread. “Do they hurt?” Will says.

Shaking his head, Hannibal offers him a glass of wine. “Less than my heart,” he says, smiling, pleasant.

“I wounded you, Dr. Lecter?”

Hannibal takes a brown paper wrap of meat from the refrigerator. “Invisible wounds are sometimes more satisfying.”

“Not to the hunter, they’re not.” The meat is unwrapped from its package. There is little blood and Will freezes. From the size of the organ alone, Hannibal will probably say it is veal or lamb. “Whose invisible wound is that?” Will asks.

“A poet’s, renowned author of love sonnets.”

The lights of the kitchen throb and falter over Will’s head. So it would be like this, he wonders. “Jack Crawford shot Matthew Brown in the chest. His bullet caught the aorta.”

Hannibal has taken a knife from the block and slices the orderly’s heart open. It doesn’t smell of meat, to Will. There is a freshness to it, almost like mint or the first whiff of air in the morning. “Doing so,” Hannibal approves, “It ripped open the pleura, which wrapped around the heart as Mr. Brown fell on his back. It secured the organ in a pocket of flesh.” Hannibal has opened the heart right between the two ventricles. He cuts them out to create space for stuffing. “But it’s been emptied. What should we fill it with?”

Will chokes on his sip of wine. It’s like something is trying to claw up his throat. He has to lean over the counter. Hannibal watches him like Will now remember he often has, measuring, evaluating the pain, but, most importantly, letting it happen, because pain was ground to something greater and immaterial. Clutching at his stomach, Will finally thinks he will throw up another ear, but it’s much bigger than that. His eyes widen as his throat, then his mouth is filled, with something coming from far below, something alive.

He bends down and expells a heart. It lands on the counter and it beats quietly in its pool of blood.

There is a smile of pride on Hannibal’s lips. It quivers into a profound delight. He takes Will’s heart and slices it. Along the way it stops beating. Mixed with mushrooms and herbs, it goes inside Matthew Brown’s heart, hidden in the shadows.

Blood still covers Will’s quaking chin. He falls to his knees and wakes up cleanly, as if he had barely closed his eyes, without a tremor of the soul. The dogs are unmoved around his bed. His breath is steady. On his tongue, he still tastes blood, wine and Hannibal’s ravishment. It’s like the coming night, its step firm and its heartbeat inexorable.


	13. hannibal cordell and mason

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Initially written for [this post](https://davantagedenuit.tumblr.com/post/148226672654/fragile-teacup-omnisexualhanniballecter-ok).

Cordell welcomes Dr. Lecter on the stone steps outside. He shakes his hand. “Mason will only be a moment,” he says.

“Am I too early?” Hannibal asks.

“Oh no,” Cordell replies, the wide smile disturbing the oval of his face. He possesses a unique technique that allows only his lips to smile and not the rest of him. “He’d like to be geared up before he meets you. I’ll go help him with the rest of the apparatus.”

Hannibal cocks an eyebrow and Cordell leaves through a door on the right.

Thoughts going to the scalpel that sits inside the hem of his shirt jacket, Hannibal paces the room. It’s ten minutes before Cordell calls him. “Mason is ready for you now, Dr. Lecter.”

Hannibal follows the voice. Cordell is gone. He finds Mason in a dim-lit room. It has fake pillars of fake stone in the worst possible taste. There is a bed with red velvet that Hannibal suspects is heart-shaped and there is Mason Verger. He is naked, standing on the tips of his toes and bound in leather straps in a manner that singles out his throat, nipples and genitals. The straps attach his feet to a metal ring in the ground and bind his arms to the side of his body. His hands are free from the wrist down and both of them are on his penis. A complex noose surrounds his neck. Eyes narrowing, Hannibal notices that it will tighten if Mason lowers on his feet or if the movements of his hands become too sudden. Or both he supposes.

“Hello Doctor,” Mason slurs.

“Hello Mason,” Hannibal says, motionless. “I’m well aware of the set-up required to satisfy asphyxiophilia. If you wanted to discuss it, a description would’ve been more than enough.”

“Come on, Doctor. Loosen up. This is all in good fun,” Mason says.

His hand begins to speed up, his penis is not erect yet. Hannibal circles the room. There are other tools and toys, nearly all of them uninteresting. The pale blue color seems favored. “You derive pleasure from the asphyxia alone, or do you need to be watched as well?” Mason moans. He’s hard now. Hannibal spots the two cameras in the corners of the room. “Or do you specifically prefer to be watched by your therapist?”

“That’d… be just weird… Doctor.”

“Not that uncommon, I assure you.”

“Come back… here,” Mason moans. His voice resembles the one of a child whining.

Hannibal frowns, briefly aghast, and returns to the front of the room where Mason can see him. He slips his hands in his pockets. Mason’s arousal smells like urine, with a faint touch of rotten candy. Hannibal’s nose twitches as the sourish scent descends in his throat. Now, he has the rare conviction that he won’t lower himself to eat Mason.

“It is not being watched that’s fun, Mason. It is you who’s watching me,” Hannibal says, moving closer. “That’s the entertaining part.”

Mason growls. He has trouble maintaining an erection. “Well.” He tightens his hand. “You’re not really entertaining for the moment. I can’t read you. Why aren’t you offended or something?”

“I apologize,” Hannibal says, smiling in the way that thins his lips into a line. In a flash, he’s at Mason’s side. His hand goes over Mason’s head and he pulls the noose tight. Mason gasps. His hands detach from his cock and fly upward, only causing the noose to close more snugly on his throat. “Finish yourself off,” Hannibal says. “Then we can talk, if you still want to.”

Gasping for air, eyes revulsing in his head, Mason grasps for his penis and strokes it desperately.

Fear makes for a poor orgasm prompter and Mason barely manages to squeeze a few drops of semen out of his member so that Hannibal can let him go. When he does, he unclasps the hook that holds the whole thing to the ceiling and Mason falls in a heap, heavy and tied up, like the sausage he should become, panting.

Hannibal bends down, unfolds his pocket square and wipes his hands. “See? That was fun,” he says.

On his way out, Hannibal meets Cordell and hands him his dirtied handkerchief.


	14. post-finale sweets

Hannibal stood in Mr. Marson’s living room. Will didn’t know who Mr. Marson was. They’d found his name on a set of keys.

The light from the television twisted with the one from the moon. Hannibal’s gray hair looked violet in it.

Jack was on television, in scenes pieced together by a reporter. “Jack is struggling,” Hannibal said.

“I thought he might.”

“Are you?”

Will thought on it. He saw the kitchen in Baltimore, Wofl Trap, Beverly Katz and Abigail, sliced apart and together, blurred in a single moment. It brought him back to the Minnesota motel room and the dusty beige curtains. “Not yet,” he said.

–

It was much harder than he thought to lay a hand on Hannibal the first time.

Hannibal commented on it. “You dreamed about killing me. That must have involved touch.”

Will stared at his hand. It was flat on Hannibal’s chest, right above the heart, warm and lost. “It was abstract. It was a means.”

A short pause. They were both breathing. The water for the tea kept boiling in the kettle. “Keep it there,” Hannibal said. He covered the hand with his. Will closed his eyes slowly.

–

“I thought about this in prison,” Hannibal said. They were on the couch, sitting apart.

“What part?” Will said.

Hannibal touched a fingertip to his thigh, then the whole finger, then the whole thigh.

“I did too,” Will said. “When you were in prison.”

“Wondering what was on your mind. Thinking about asking you. Supposing you wouldn’t tell me.”

“You would already know.” Will didn’t know what he was doing. It was night time. They had had one glass of wine each. Will hadn’t even finished his because of the blur from the pain meds. A tremor went through him. He took Hannibal’s hand on his leg and it still felt foreign and closer than his own mind, and staggeringly warm, all at the same time. “When you thought about it, what did I do?”

Hannibal gave a slow shake of his head, like a nudge. “It never went farther than that.”

–

“You should do it,” Will told him.

The sheet were rough cotton, softened by the strangers it had held. Their heads were on the same pillow. Will had Hannibal’s breath on his neck, tepid, calm.

It was the first time Hannibal kissed him. His lips touched the back of his neck, the last vertebra, before the brain stem. Will rocked back into him, like a caress.

–

In the morning, Will had a quiet laugh, not mockery, not game. “I dreamed about this,” he said.

Hannibal ran a hand into his hair, chasing it out of his eyes. It had grown back so that the bangs fell on his eyelids. “Please, pursue.”

Will huffed. “After I met you, the first time.”

“In Jack’s office.”

“In Jack’s office.” Will nuzzled the pillow. “Textbook sex dream.”

Hannibal quirked an eyebrow. “Any decent psychiatrist you’d have mentioned this to would have made a point to mark its significance.”

“I marked it as the fact that you couldn’t be that horrible if my subconscious liked you.”

A beam of light warmed their legs. “And yet I was,” Hannibal said.

Will’s hand brushed the strand of hair that curled on Hannibal’s forehead. “And yet you were.”


	15. tome-wan missing scene

Will knows why he drove to Hannibal’s office that morning. But it’s so deep and shapeless it’s hard to name yet. His head still aches from the blow from Mason’s men. The aspirin doesn’t cut it, the same way it didn’t when encephalitis was burning his neurons to shreds.

The office is closed, but Will knows about the door in the back. He finds Hannibal’s footsteps in the snow there. It’s not locked and he walks in.

At the end of the corridor, the door to the office proper is open. Will steps in the doorframe. Hannibal is not in his usual suit. He’s changed the shirt and jacket for a thick sweater that looks bulky. He’s holding something. A mop. There’s a sponge too, on the side, sunken in a bright red. There’s the faint gash on his brow from the fight Will didn’t see at Mason’s pig farm.

The pool of blood is between where Will stands and the desk. Whoever got got at that point was coming from behind.

Hannibal turns around at the sound of steps. “The blade caught his femoral artery,” he says. “Had he left it in the wound, he could have made it. Maybe.”

“How many were there?” Will says. “When they came to get you.”

“Three. How many for you?”

“Just one.” Will walks to the window. Hannibal starts scrubbing the floor again. “Two of my dogs were sick last night.”

A pause in the scrubbing. “They are not used to a diet of raw meat.”

Will shakes inside, as if he was about to say something that mattered. It sounds ultimate and profound the way it turns around in his head. “Don’t do that again,” he says. “Use my dogs. They’ve got nothing to do with this.”

Hannibal stands up straighter, leans the mop against his desk carefully. “This?”

Will nods and doesn’t answer. “Please. I’d like you not to do that again.”

There is a minute shift on Hannibal’s brow. But it changes the air between them and Will feels it from the other end of the room. “Agreed,” Hannibal says.

There is a moment when Will senses the room spinning and twitching. “Just like that?”

Another subtle notch as Hannibal returns to what he was, more still, well-presented. A door has closed. A path has been revealed and hidden again. “Just like that,” he says.

And just like that, Will stops wondering when he got so lost and starts thinking that maybe he isn’t lost.


End file.
